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Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the first time in human history,” fueling a growing water disaster that will wreak havoc on economies, food production and lives, according to a landmark new report. Decades of destructive land use and water mismanagement have collided with the human-caused climate crisis to put “unprecedented stress” on the global water cycle, said the report published Wednesday by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a group of international leaders and experts. The water cycle refers to the complex system by which water moves around the Earth. Water evaporates from...

Is there anything after death? What is the meaning of life? Are we just a bag of atoms? The scientist Sabine Hossenfelder, born in Frankfurt (Germany) 48 years ago, is convinced that if there is a branch of science capable of finding answers to humanity’s existential questions, it is physics. Specialized in theoretical physics and quantum gravity, Hossenfelder combines her research work with science communication (she is the creator of the YouTube channel Science without the gobbledygook). Her latest book, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (published in English in 2022, and out in Spanish this year)...

Researchers propose using “wood vaults” to store carbon by burying wood to prevent decomposition, potentially sequestering up to 10 gigatons of CO2 annually. Further study is needed to assess the method’s environmental impacts and scalability. Inspired by the discovery of an ancient buried log, researchers have developed a new method to capture and store atmospheric carbon for centuries. The technique involves sealing woody biomass in “wood vaults,” offering a potentially cost-effective way to combat climate change. Achieving net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is crucial for combating climate change, yet reducing fossil fuel emissions alone is insufficient to meet the Paris...

A second catastrophic hurricane in as many weeks has forced the U.S. government to grapple with a harsh reality: Climate calamities are becoming more frequent, deadly and costly in a country already facing massive fiscal challenges. The earliest estimates suggest the latest storm, Hurricane Milton, may have unleashed roughly $50 billion in damage across Florida, destroying countless homes, businesses and critical infrastructure that will need to be repaired or replaced, probably with the help of urgently needed federal aid. But Milton is only the most recent extreme weather event in a nation that experiences on average a billion-dollar climate disaster...

Thursday morning, four protesters — two men and two women — barged into three Trump for President campaign offices across the Delaware Valley, ranting about climate change. It’s believed the same group of four forced their way into Trump campaign offices in Media, Philadelphia, and Newtown, a person familiar with the situation told DVJournal. Police reports were filed in all three instances. The source believes security camera images will identify the individuals who trespassed inside the Trump campaign offices. The protesters demanded campaign workers tell former President Donald Trump to take climate change seriously, saying the recent hurricanes were proof,...

Since we started burning fossil fuels on a widespread, global scale, the number of people killed by natural disasters has gotten smaller, not bigger.Does this mean that we have fewer natural disasters now than in the past?No.Instead, what it means is that the huge amount of wealth that we have created by burning fossil fuels has made us better able to withstand natural disasters.This chart shows the number of people killed (per 100,000 population) by natural disasters by decade.You can see a bigger version of the chart by clicking this link: https://www.businessinsider.com/natural-disasters-used-to-be-so-much-worse-2015-2

Imagine hearing a knock on your door and opening it to find actor Jane Fonda campaigning for a local election candidate. That's how the 86-year-old actor and activist is spending her time this election season. She's campaigning around the country for local candidates who support action on climate change, building on her years of climate-related protests. Fonda told CBS News that the campaigning work felt so necessary that she told her agent she wouldn't be taking any acting jobs this year, to make sure she had time to canvass. "This year I said to my agent 'I'm sorry, I can't...

President Biden called on Americans Wednesday to “put politics aside” to focus on Hurricane Helene recovery efforts — moments before stepping on his own message by saying that anyone who doubts climate change’s role in the disaster “must be brain dead.” “In a moment like this, we put politics aside, at least we should put it all aside, and we have here,” the retiring 81-year-old president said during a recovery briefing in Raleigh, NC. “There are no Democrats or Republicans, there are only Americans, and our job is to help as many people as we can, as quickly as we...

Climate change is exacerbating the risk of potentially dangerous mosquito-borne diseases in California — threatening to turn more of those annoying-but-harmless bites into severe illnesses, experts say. California already grapples with West Nile virus, a potentially deadly disease that was first detected in the state about two decades ago. But officials are now warning of a potential new foe: dengue, a viral infection that in the most serious cases can also lead to life-threatening complications. Until last year, all dengue cases reported in California were associated with people traveling to a country where the disease is common. But Los Angeles...

National Public Radio knows who is driving climate change as an existential threat: men who eat meat. And they found the origins of the current crisis in a 2006 television ad for Burger KIng that heralded the fast food chain and its appetite-satisfying whopper as a source of masculine culinary delight totally unlike the small portions of vegetarian food offered by places where women like to frequent. That ad began running when Malcolm Regisford, whom NPR interviewed for the story, was 10 years old, Regisford saw this commercial often in between his cartoons. “Beef is marketed to men — steaks...

Scientists researched a drug called IU1 for its potential to alleviate age-related issues in protein quality control systems. Aging is an unavoidable process often associated with multiple health conditions. As a result, research into the effects of aging has become increasingly important, with scientists exploring ways to slow down aging and mitigate its harmful effects on the human body. Although aging leads to the gradual decline of all bodily systems, one of the primary contributing factors is the disruption of protein homeostasis, also known as “proteostasis.” Our cells have several mechanisms that help detect damaged or misfolded proteins and break...

An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized — offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans. The timeline, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced, the authors say. Created by combining more than 150,000 pieces of fossil evidence with state-of-the-art climate models, it shows the intimate link between carbon dioxide and global...

In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet). The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time. Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened. For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn't until 1995 that myth became fact. On the...

The study, which explores how particulate pollution impacts the adolescent brain, involves 10,000 youth and is among the first of its kind. According to a recent study by the University of Colorado Boulder, which analyzed 10,000 children aged 9 to 11, each additional day of exposure to wildfire smoke and other severe air pollutants slightly increases the risk of mental health issues in young people. “We found that a greater number of days with fine particulate air pollution levels above EPA standards was associated with increased symptoms of mental illness, both during the year of exposure and up to one...

Kamala Harris and the Democrats have gone strangely silent about the “climate crisis” they warned was an existential threat a few years ago.. Don’t look now, but the “climate crisis” is officially over. No need to take my word for it. Just ask the Democratic Party’s new standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, who mentioned the topic “just once” in her acceptance speech at the recent Democratic National Convention, according to The New York Times. The Times also noted that Harris “has not offered any new policies for addressing climate change.” How far we have come in five short years....

New research reveals that discrepancies between the locations where fossils are found and the areas where early humans are thought to have resided could affect our comprehension of human evolutionary history.A significant portion of the early human fossil record comes from a few key locations in Africa, where ideal geological conditions have preserved a wealth of fossils that scientists use to piece together the story of human evolution. One notable area is the eastern branch of the East African Rift System, which includes important fossil sites like Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania.Yet, the eastern branch of the rift system only accounts...

Pope Francis calls for Catholics to ‘pray for the cry of the Earth,’ says it ‘has a fever’‘We pray that each of us will listen with the heart to the cry of the Earth,’ Pope Francis said in a new video, claiming that ‘if we took the planet’s temperature, it will us that the Earth has a fever. And it is sick, just like anyone who’s sick.’Pope Francis calls for ecological concern in his Pope Video.This September, Pope Francis has urged members of the Catholic Church to “pray for the cry of the Earth” and “the victims of environmental disasters...

Imperial College London research has found limits to how quickly we can scale up technology to store gigatonnes of carbon dioxide under Earth's surface. Current international scenarios for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees by the end of the century rely on technologies that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from Earth's atmosphere faster than humans release it. This means removing CO2 at a rate of 1–30 gigatonnes per year by 2050. However, estimates for the speed at which these technologies can be deployed have been highly speculative. Now, findings from a new study led by Imperial College London researchers...

WASHINGTON) -- Climate change may not be a top concern for voters for the 2024 presidential election, but that hasn't stopped many Republicans from making misrepresentations about environmental and energy policy – a departure from the previous tactic of majority climate change denial, according to experts on environmental politics who spoke with ABC News. Debates around energy policy, specifically regarding renewable energy versus fossil fuels, are inherently connected to climate change, in large part because fossil fuels are the largest contributor to climate change, according to the United Nations, accounting for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and...

Highlighting seas that are rising at an accelerating rate, especially in the far more vulnerable Pacific island nations, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued yet another climate SOS to the world. This time he said those initials stand for “save our seas.” The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization Monday issued reports on worsening sea level rise, turbocharged by a warming Earth and melting ice sheets and glaciers. They highlight how the Southwestern Pacific is not only hurt by the rising oceans, but by other climate change effects of ocean acidification and marine heat waves. Guterres toured Samoa and Tonga...